09 September 2018 1:00 AM

I pray every day for Archbishop Justin Welby, though with no very great hope of success. Christians are supposed to pray for their enemies, and he seems to be one of those.

I will never forget the panic-stricken look on his face when I said a friendly hello to him at a Lambeth Palace reception, to which I had obviously been invited by mistake. I suspect – judging by his open dismay – that he would have preferred to have had Satan at his party. I left very soon afterwards.

And later I came to have a really low opinion of his abilities, and of his interest in justice, as I and others battled to get such justice for the truly great Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who died 60 years ago.

Under Archbishop Welby’s leadership, Bishop Bell was publicly denounced by his own Church as a paedophile after a miserable secret kangaroo court. The evidence against him was ancient, thin and uncorroborated, and no defence had even been heard. Yet, now that this process has been exposed as the unfair botch it was, the Archbishop still won’t accept he made a mistake.

And his endorsement of last week’s wild Blairite demand for more taxes and a severe assault on our freedom to pass on our hard-earned life savings to our children, did nothing to improve my opinion.

Christians can be socialists or conservatives, or liberals in politics. Or they can be none of these things. It is their personal actions, not their views, that matter. It is absolutely not the task of the religious leader of England to take sides on political and economic quarrels of which he plainly knows little and understands less.

But does he understand the Gospels any better? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ at no point says ‘Blessed are the Tax Collectors’. When he tells us to help the hungry, the sick and the homeless, he does not tell us to hand on the job to the State. He tells us to do it ourselves, not through the cold, impersonal agencies of PAYE and the Universal Credit system.

Governments are often very bad at spending money. I pay quite a bit of tax, and wouldn’t mind at all if it went (for example) on an NHS that was well-run, schools that I thought were good, or on a criminal justice system that I thought was effective. But I get none of these things.

And it’s not because the State has too little money that this rich country now has so many food banks.It is because the state is so incompetent at helping those in real trouble. Charities, sustained by private donations and private hard work, often do the job much better.

Higher tax will not mean people give more to charity. It will mean they give less. Worse, if you threaten the freedom to inherit, you threaten private property itself. And if you threaten that, you threaten the whole basis of freedom. Without private property we all become slaves of the secular, anti-Christian state. How can that be a Christian desire?

Nobody is against tax as such. Most of us are in favour of other people paying more tax. But almost nobody is in favour of paying more himself, in practice.

Look into many tax avoidance schemes and you will generally find plenty of right-on leftist comedians and media figures, taking full advantage. And, though HM Revenue & Customs is always happy to accept voluntary extra contributions, for some reason these are rare.

THE Archbishop, amusingly, issued his fatwa against inherited wealth and in favour of tax through the Institute for Public Policy Research. This leftist coven was set up to provide a fancy figleaf for New Labour’s wild debauch of spending and borrowing, which destroyed many pension funds and plunged the nation deep in debt.

But, oh, look, the IPPR, so keen on taxing others, has somehow qualified to be a registered charity. This status normally means not having to pay income or corporation tax, capital gains tax, or stamp duty. Gifts to registered charities are also usually free of the inheritance tax that Archbishop Welby wants to be so strictly applied to the rest of us. They are often spared all or most business rates on their premises, and can get special VAT treatment.

Quite why such outfits as the IPPR should escape the punitive taxes which are now putting so many small firms and shops out of business, I have no idea. Couldn’t the money be better spent on the poor? Perhaps the Archbishop could do something about it?

***

BBC’s squalid excuses for child killers

The over-praised BBC drama Mother’s Day seemed to me to have forgotten who actually murdered Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry in Warrington in 1993.

Well, I certainly remember: the IRA, whose apologists and supporters are now invited to the White House and Windsor Castle, planted high explosives in cast-iron litter bins in the heart of an English town where – as it happened – many Irish people lived. These cruel monsters made sure those fleeing the first bomb would run straight into the blast of the second.

The culprits have never been caught, and if they were, they would be almost immediately released under the nauseating terms of our surrender to the IRA. The drama, in my view, made far too much of stupid excuses issued by Republicans for this crime. It gave valuable airtime to fictional mouthpieces and excuse-makers for the IRA cause. It also greatly exaggerated a minor fire at the Irish club in Warrington to suggest it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.

No doubt Tim and Johnathan were not the first or only children to die in the Troubles. No doubt Loyalist bombs were just as savage. No doubt the British Army and the police were not without faults. But so what? The IRA men who coldly planted bombs outside a town centre branch of McDonald’s, set to go off at lunchtime on a Saturday, deliberately set out to kill and maim innocent people including children and did so, horribly. Nobody made them do it. There was no excuse for this. There never will be.

Nobody, least of all the BBC, should try to make one.

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A moving message from the Cold War

If ever you are tempted to forget how lucky we are to live on our safe island, see the brilliant new Polish film Cold War, in which Joanna Kulig plays one of a pair of lovers whose lives – which in a free country would have been happy and contented – are utterly ruined by the Iron Curtain. There are no car chases, and there is mercifully little sex. But there is a lot of thought.

***

When I lived in crime-ridden Moscow, I had a solid steel front door. Such things were and are common there. After the recent incident in Bexley in South-East London, when a family out for a meal watched in amazement on a mobile phone (linked to their doorbell) as armed robbers kicked their front door off its hinges at 9pm, I wonder if the time has come to follow Moscow rules here. British houses are not made to withstand such attacks. We assume the law keeps us safe. But bad people are not afraid of the law now.

***

I am increasingly frightened by electric bicycles, actually rather fast, near-silent heavy motorbikes which are unregistered but can kill or maim. Are these ever-more-common things adequately regulated or controlled?

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09 October 2016 1:26 AM

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them. Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence. I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market. And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020. They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer. And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about itI am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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10 April 2016 1:52 AM

If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t bother arguing with him. Get control of a major TV or radio soap opera and you are halfway there. I would love to infiltrate the scriptwriters of Coronation Street and insert a storyline about a bright young teenager who starts smoking cannabis and ends up hopelessly mentally ill, stuck on a locked ward as his weeping parents wonder why nobody did anything to enforce the drug laws.

Or EastEnders might feature the misery and disappointment of a bright child from a poor home, who was bullied and neglected in a vast state comprehensive and so had her hopes ruined by egalitarian dogma.

Or the BBC Radio 4 series, The Archers, might tell the story of an innocent couple targeted by social workers claiming falsely that they had abused their child, and snatching that child away forever in secret and deeply unfair court hearings.

If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t bother arguing with him. Get control of a major TV or radio soap opera and you are halfway there

All these things happen in real life. But, of course, the broadcasting organisations, being in the hands of the Left, would not do this.

They are too busy re-educating us into right-on citizenship of our new people’s republic, with lesbian kisses to approve of, incest to be understanding about, a male- to-female transsexual (played by a real woman) and other heroes and heroines of Left-wing mythology to admire.

One recent drama, for instance, managed to make a sympathetic heroine out of an asylum seeker who broke the laws against taking paid work.

The Archers is currently harrowing its listeners with a heavy-handed melodrama about a bullied woman who eventually stabs her overbearing husband. I am not a regular listener, but as far as I could see she could have avoided the whole episode by leaving home before he got back from work. Yet the scriptwriters plainly want us to sympathise with the stabber.

It’s no use saying it’s just fiction. These dramas have a huge influence on national thought. Thousands of people actually mix up their own schooldays with the plots of the ill-disciplined fictional comprehensive school Grange Hill, whose pupils were saturated in modern progressive thought. Back in 1998, when a non-existent Deirdre Rachid was sent to a non-existent prison in Coronation Street, the real Prime Minister and the real Leader of the Opposition vied with each other to call for her release.

If I had managed to work my way into the world of TV or radio soap opera, I might actually have got somewhere with all the causes I have failed to advance in years of public debate. How is it that this amazingly influential sector of broadcasting is not in any way covered by the rules on impartiality? Isn’t it time we took it as seriously as it deserves to be taken?

Payback time for the tax zealots

David Cameron has only himself to blame for the fix he is in. He and his Chancellor have ceaselessly blurred the huge difference between criminal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance.

They have repeatedly referred to them as if they were the same. They have absurdly suggested that they can put an end to avoidance, which will continue to exist in any country which has tax laws and skilled lawyers paid lots of money to find ways around them.

They have also started warbling in the Left-wing choir which caterwauls that paying taxes is somehow a moral duty, rather than a legal obligation.

It’s not true. Taxes are in many cases squandered on servicing foolish debts incurred by bungling Ministers who knew the taxpayer would bail them out. Or they are thrown away on the most appalling school system, or the most useless police force in the advanced world.

I will pay what I owe, because I believe in the rule of law. But if I’m offered a legal way of paying less tax I will take it – and so will anyone, including quite a lot of prominent Leftists, especially in the media. Indeed, I believe a prominent Left-wing newspaper (you know who you are) recently managed to avoid a thumping great tax bill by using a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands.

The Left-wing tax zealots aren’t free to do this because they have publicly embraced this idea that tax is a type of goodness. If Mr Cameron disappears up his own anatomy thanks to his offshore fund, I shall laugh quite a lot.

But this has really happened because he is past the peak of his power. Seven years ago, when I tried to work up some interest about his record as one of Parliament’s greediest claimers of expenses (£1,700 a month on a £350,000 mortgage, close to the maximum possible, later dropping to £1,000 a month, plus – of course – council tax, gas, oil and insurance), nobody cared a bit.

Most people still aren’t aware of how their taxes helped a very rich man and his even richer wife buy a rather nice country home, now worth at least a million pounds. What’s moral about forcing a dinner lady or a hospital cleaner to contribute to Mr Cameron’s mortgage?

But that’s the sort of thing tax does in modern Britain. I wouldn’t blame any normal person for keeping what they can.

But Mr Cameron himself, a self-righteous taxation zealot who has personally done very well out of the public purse, deserves everything he now gets. I did try to tell you.

The 'rebels' without a cause

What is it about The Rolling Stones? How is it that they have become one of the most lucrative business enterprises of modern times, and yet still manage to portray themselves as dangerous rebels?

Thanks to the opening of an exhibition about them, we can once again enjoy this picture of the original group (that’s what we called them then) in 1963, wearing… uniform. This was before they discovered that looking a bit dangerous and scruffy was better for trade. It’s evidence of a remarkable flexibility.

There’s also the little matter of a catchy little song called Under My Thumb, in which Mick Jagger exults over how he’s forced a girl who ‘once pushed me around’ into changing her clothes and doing just what she’s told. The ‘squirming dog who’s just had her day’ now ‘keeps her eyes to herself’ while he ‘can still look at someone else’.

This is the sort of attitude that can get you liked by the Taliban or stabbed on The Archers. It certainly doesn’t fit with the feminism of his modern fans. Does he sing it any more? As for rebellion, if the Stones made any gesture towards human freedom during their recent visit to the Cuban tyranny, I haven’t seen it reported. The brand isn’t always the same as the reality.

****

I am sure Justin Welby thought there was 'no reason to doubt' that his mother's husband was his father. But he wasn't. I hope this revelation also helps the Archbishop realise that there is 'reason to doubt' his unfair condemnation of Bishop George Bell.

02 October 2014 2:27 PM

A lot of David Cameron’s speech in Birmingham was either weary sloganizing, crude electoral claptrap or cliché, so I don’t propose to do a complete analysis of the text (which is currently available here http://press.conservatives.com/ )

But I thought I would look at some of parts of it that seemed to me to be interesting, not necessarily in ways that Mr Cameron or his aides and speechwriters would want them to be interesting. By the way, anyone watching the BBC news channel’s coverage of the speech would have noted that the commentators selected to comment on it afterwards were *both* from the heart of the Tory project, and both from the Blairite ‘Times’ stable. They were Lord (Danny) Finkelstein,long sympathetic to the Cameron project; and Tim Montgomerie, of ‘Conservative Home’. Wouldn’t it have been a touch more balanced to have included a person sympathetic to UKIP, and a person sympathetic to Labour? Also there was a curious segment in which representatives leaving the hall were asked for their opinions. The first two were gushing, one of them embarrassingly turning out to be a keen EUphile. But the third was quite rude about it. It seems to me that it’s quite remarkable to find an activist , who has probably paid to be there, being rude about his own leader’s speech on live TV. The BBC commentator seemed to me to be anxious to portray the speech as a success, and to have been discombobulated by the critic.

What is Patriotism really?

I would first of all note that the Second World War is still the moral gospel of modern politics. Somehow or other, it is confused in his mind with his (pro tem) victory over Scottish separatism. I think this has something to do with the Union Jack. The straightforward, unashamedly patriotic idea of defending the Union because it makes us strong , independent of the continent and less vulnerable to back-door attack ( a clear and honest reason for doing so) is obviously unattractive to him. He doesn’t see the Union in this way, and is very happy with Britain’s post 1945 return to continental entanglements and dependence. Any wars we may have fought, therefore, must be for similarly non-patriotic, idealistic purposes.

He described his constituent, Patrick Churchill, as having been ‘fighting fascism’ in Normandy in 1944, a curiously leftish description of that conflict. Very few actual ‘Fascists’ were involved by 1944, Italy having got rid of Mussolini and changed sides by then. I suspect Patrick Churchill thought back in 1944 that he was fighting ‘Germans’. Many people in Europe, who had done the same before, came to that conclusion. It was a rather particular experience, unlike fighting anyone else. My mother, who was bombed by them, and my father, many of whose friends were killed by them and whose life was in ceaseless perils from their aircraft and ships for months on end, both referred to them as ‘Germans’ during my 1950s childhood when the subject was still all-embracing.

My mother in particular could never abide hearing the German language spoken, saying that it made her shudder. I think she was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Years later we had a German ex-PoW as a neighbour, and ny parents got on perfectly well with him as far as I could see (in fact I think my father had some respect for him as a fellow fighting man from the war) . But that was the 1960s.

It only became an ideological war later.

Mr Cameron unwittingly employs the language of the Comintern

But I don’t think Mr Cameron knows that, Having grown up since the 1960s, he probably uses these Marxoid categories himself without thinking, not knowing that the Soviet Union and the Comintern popularised the term ‘Fascism’ for the Axis enemy (and later as a general boo-word and all-purpose anti-conservative smear) for very specific reasons.

The first was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as it was widely known ( a recent book on this astonishing alliance, reviewed on this blog a few days ago, can be purchased here

This made the Comintern and the Kremlin a little nervous about the word ‘Nazi’, which would trigger, in millions of minds, memories of the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.

They had another difficulty, too. ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’ and once again makes that awkward connection between the two murderous, utopian dogmas of the 20th century, whose profound similarities the Left have always wished us to ignore - and which we all had to ignore anyway when we became Stalin’s ally in 1941. They had so much in common - power worship, leader-worship, militarism, censorship, secret police, destruction of private life , thought control, torture, perversion of the young, turning of children against their parents, hatred of Christianity, means-and-ends ‘morals’, single parties, uniforms, shouting, people’s courts, show trials, labour camps, controlled media, cowed academies, intellectual apologists. One wanted to exterminate on the grounds of race, the other on the grounds of class.

But if we say we were fighting ‘fascism’ in 1944, we don’t have to think about that.

Anyway, I think it culturally interesting that a Conservative Premier should use such language.

Is there really any link between World War Two and Afghanistan?

Then there was this elision : ‘The heirs to those who fought on the beaches of Northern France are those fighting in Afghanistan today. For thirteen years, young men and women have been serving our country there.’

Is that really so? The Afghan War , futile by any measure, was a war of choice in which professional soldiers did as they were told by politicians they don’t respect (and were of course thrown to the wolves if they ever got caught doing anything nasty) . The 1939-45 war, whatever its many faults, often discussed here, was not in the same category in nature, cause, importance or scale. To try to cover up the fact that, for five long years, Mr Cameron sucked up to the Murdoch press by continuing our Afghan engagement, by equating it with the liberation of France in 1944 is, in my view, a bit much.

If politicians knew what servicemen really thought of them, they would never try to pose in the reflected shine of military glory. They would be too embarrassed.

Can we afford to drop these bombs?

Now, again with the frantic encouragement of the Murdoch press, we are using World War Three equipment and weapons to bomb a few 4X4 pick-up trucks in Iraq. I gather each of these missions costs something like £210,000 an hour ( see http://news.sky.com/story/1342768/how-much-will-airstrikes-on-is-cost-taxpayer , and yes, I know this is a Murdoch outlet. He’s not all bad ) , but that’s if they bring their bombs back. If they use them, the mission cost can rise far higher. And yet we are a bankrupt country. How can we afford this?

The only purpose of this war is political, to try to look good at home to the few dim people who think Britain is still a world power, and to suck up to the Americans (who I suspect don’t care whether we turn up or not).

Shamelessly, Mr Cameron intoned ‘The threat is Islamist extremist terrorism – and it has found a new, hellish crucible – with ISIL, in Iraq and Syria. These people are evil, pure and simple. They kill children; rape women; threaten non-believers with genocide; behead journalists and aid workers.’

Well, what does he think is going in Libya, whose fate is his personal responsibility for the rest of his life. Or in Nigeria? Has he studied the governance of our ally Saudi Arabia? Or noted that Western air-attacks on Libya undoubtedly (though accidentally)killed children, as was reliably reported at the time?

As for ‘These people are evil, pure and simple.’, so are the IRA, with whose frontmen he willingly does business.

Did Oxford make a mistake?

All these points have been made many times about his vapourings, by many others apart from me. He must be aware of the criticism. He is supposed, by the examiners of Oxford University, to have a first-class mind. Yet he does not moderate or adapt the crude, Sun-type language. Is this because he is shameless, or because Oxford made a mistake?

As for ‘There is no “walk on by” option. Unless we deal with ISIL, they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets,’, this is simply untrue. The Iraqi Sunni fanatics probably have as little idea of where Birmingham is as Mr Cameron does of where Mosul is. Most major countries have indeed chosen to ‘walk on by’. I don’t think that will make the Islamists any more likely to attack them

Then there’s a lot of macho bluster about taking passports away from, and locking up, people who , more consistently than Her Majesty’s Government, have stuck with the (admittedly mad and unwise) policy of aiding the Syrian rebels which Mr Cameron (and the interesting Brooks Newmark) wanted to adopt so much - until Parliament got in the way.

For the Syrian rebels were and are of course the same people as ‘ISIL.’

England is, well, a lot bigger than the other members of the UK, yah?

Then we have a section on ‘English votes for English laws’ - The fact that England is far bigger, more populous and richer than any of the other nations of the UK, and has different religious and political traditions as well, still seems to escape Mr Cameron and other Tories. Once you’ve accepted that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from England, then you’re going to have to live with anomalies like the West Lothian Question. If you don’t want to live with them, then why encourage these nations to stay in the UK at all, let alone claim you love them so much that they mustn’t go?

If London starts demanding autonomy, as well it may, will the Tories take the same view, denying London MPs a vote on English laws? I don’t think so. Well, in that case, it’s not a principle.

The First Thumping Terminological Inexactitude

Then we get the first really thumping terminological inexactitude of the speech:

‘Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do.

And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies……based on Conservative values……leading a majority Conservative Government.’

Mr Cameron was never forced by anyone to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He did not ‘have to’ do it. He could have tried to run a minority government, proposed a programme, been defeated, gone to the country and won or lost.

He could have let the Liberal Democrats and Labour form a minority coalition and let them tear themselves to bits before forcing a confidence vote and again causing an election.

He could have negotiated far more fiercely with the Liberal Democrats, who would have sacrificed limbs and organs to get into office for the first time in peacetime for about 90 years. The LibDem negotiators have said since that they were astonished how readily their Tory negotiating partners gave in to their demands, and even asked them if they wanted anything else on top.

He could have proposed a three-year partnership with the freedom to dissolve it before the election. But no, he went for a rigid and detailed pact, and then guaranteed it for five full years with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act.

All these actions were matters of choice. The choices he made suggest to me that he wanted office above all ( he certainly seems to enjoy it) , and was ready to pay a very heavy price for it .

They also suggest that he had known for some months that he was going to lose, and had thought deeply about what he would do if so. And the deal that he made suggests that he saw the LibDems as an important ally against his own conservative faction. Like the absent Jorkins in ‘David Copperfield’, fear of a LibDem walkout could always be employed to browbeat anti-EU, pro-grammar school types into giving way. Mr Cameron and his allies have always had far more in common with Nick Clegg that they do with ‘Cornerstone’ and its members.

But the arrangement was founded on the belief that Tory conservatives had nowhere else to go. This was true in 2010. It isn’t now. They have dug a tunnel called UKIP since then, and more and more of them are scurrying along it to freedom.

Mr Cameron misses a bit out of his speech

Mr Cameron’s speech was like Ed Miliband’s in two ways. One (in practice rather than rhetoric) he totally ignored the vast deficit which his government increases every week with profligate borrowing. Despite this position of hopeless indebtedness, in which tax receipts cannot be stretched to match the government’s outgoings, he blithely promised tax cuts worth (I believe ) £7,000,000,000 a year. At the same time he promised to safeguard the NHS’ vast budget, which is a bottomless commitment and will strain every other area of spending. Where *is* all this to come from? We are already borrowing £2,000,000,000 a week just to make ends meet. And every penny of that adds to our huge budget for debt servicing.

Two, he spent most of it apparently ignoring another vast and important fact – the existence of UKIP, daily taking form him more votes, more members and more donors.

He did not mention UKIP at all until the last few minutes of his oration, and then not in a serious fashion. Yet his whole purpose was to damage UKIP He pretended throughout that his real opponent was Ed Miliband, a man who struggles to find and show any difference between his plans and the policies of the present government. In fact his main opponent is Nigel Farage, a man who actually disagrees with him and appeals to many of his voters and supporters, and whose breakthrough offers a long-term threat to Mr Cameron and all who sail in him.

Two Phantom Governments are described

Mr Cameron displayed to the electorate two imaginary governments – one a sort of Bolshevik Milibandite spectre which – he implied – was against private education and would ruin the country even more than it has already been ruined by Mr Osborne’s debt-driven housing bubble boom, the bill for which must come in pretty soon.

And the other a sort of Angelic Ghost of Christmas Past, an actual majority Tory government of the type that hasn’t existed for 17 long years, because the Tories can’t win a Commons majority.

This phantasm will fulfil all the ‘promises’ that Tory central office feeds every few months to what’s left of the Tory press . There’s all that stuff, dredged up in great scoops near elections, about being tough with the EU. There’s that ‘British Bill of Rights’ that has been roaming round the edge of the playing field waiting to bat for years now, but whose face we never see (I suspect that if we could see it, it would look remarkably like the Human Rights Act, only with a different name).

There are those tax cuts that can’t possibly be afforded (though what happened to the old inheritance tax promise from 2010?) .

We are proud of our Green Belt Policy and we are building on it

There are those cheap houses. This pledge at least is partly being fulfilled. The Tories’ friends, the developers, are chewing up great tracts of countryside to build more rows of mean, cramped hutches, from which mortgagees can then commute vast distances on choked roads and decrepit railways, to underpaid, insecure jobs, pausing only to stash their infant children in state-subsidised day-orphanages. British liberty reborn, eh?

Actually, anyone who *can* remember the last Tory majority government will recall that it was pretty much the same as the one we have now, monstrously politically correct, hopelessly pro-EU, obsessed with flashy gimmicks and centralisation in education. Its only good policy was the one it was forced into totally against its will – departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which boosted the economy just in time for the Blairites to plunder it again in 1997.

Trying to re-fight the 1992 Election, but without Neil Kinnock, and with UKIP

The election Mr Cameron wants to fight is the 1992 one which extended the Major era. To do so he has to portray Ed Miliband as Neil Kinnock, which he isn’t, and to pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist, which it does.

He also has to pretend that people like me, and I suspect there are quite a lot of them, are as willing to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt as they were in 1992. And he has to pretend that the Tory Party membership, voting reserve and organisation are anything like as good as they were in 1992.

If his recovery were real, he might manage it. As it is a matter of ‘meagre ‘self-employment’, zero-hours contracts and a housing bubble, mostly confined to the better-off bits of the South of England, I think he may be in for a surprise. Certainly, no opinion poll suggests a Tory majority government, or has done for many years.

We all went to bed with David Cameron in 2010, and woke up with Nick Clegg. After that experience, waking up with Ed Miliband isn’t really going to be much of a shock. Mr Cameron would much rather lose to Ed Miliband than to Nigel Farage, because his project, such as it is, would be safe in Mr Miliband’s hands. And ask yourself this, honestly: In a seat where the Tories can’t win, do you think Mr Cameron would rather it fell to UKIP or to Labour?

Their hypocrisy drives me mad. Our hypocrisy doesn’t

Now we come to the section on education.

‘The biggest risk to all this is Labour. You know what drives me the most mad about them?

The hypocrisy.’

There then follows this confused passage about Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, who has struggled throughout his tenure to find any substantial policy differences with the Tories

Mr Cameron said :’Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy.’

This true. But look at what comes next:

‘But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.’

Really? I know of no plan by Labour to abolish private fee-paying schools. If you can pay the fees ( and few can) Labour’s happy to let you do so, just like the Tories.

The Prime Minister then mangled facts and logic out of all shape and sense, saying:: ’He (Mr Hunt) went to an independent school that wasn’t set up by a local authority…’

That’s the thing about independent schools. They weren’t set up by local authorities. They are private foundations. Hence the name.

Mr Cameron continued ‘…but no, he doesn’t want charities and parents to set up schools for your children.’

This is the one rather tiny difference between the two parties, which are more or less united on the gimmicky, worthless policy of rebranding comprehensives as ‘academies’ or a something of the kind. Labour doesn’t favour the ‘free schools’ which have, to put it mildly, had a mixed record since they were allowed, and which are as remote as Tibet for most people, since there are so few of them. Not all of us can (or want to) live near Toby Young. And if there are any instances of rich Tory politicians, or Tory politicians living within reach of existing selective state schools, sending their children to Free Schools, I’d like to hear them. Michael Gove himself , living within yards of an academy he had ceaselessly praised, and not all that far from a free school too, chose for his daughter a traditional single-sex Church-based former grammar school. Who could blame him, if it weren’t for his political activities? But Mr Gove’s political hypocrisy escaped Mr Cameron’s fierce eye.

Our premier went on: ‘I tell you – Tristram Hunt and I might both have been educated at some of the best schools in our country.But here’s the difference: You, Tristram – like the rest of the Labour Party – want to restrict those advantages……I want to spread them to every child in Britain.’

American readers baffled by my previous posting on Theresa May’s secondary schooling should grasp the real point here. Until 1965, Britain had many hundreds of first-class state schools, free to the bright children of poor homes, which rivalled the best independent (fee-paying) schools in the quality of their education. By their nature, they were selective, and not everyone could go to them. Entrance was decided by an examination generally thought to be fair.

Tory and Labour parties, influenced by left-wing ideologues who reasoned that if everyone couldn’t have a good schooling, nobody but the rich should get one, shut almost all these schools down. Now, good schooling is only available ( as in the USA) to those who can pay fees, or those who can buy homes in the catchment areas of the better High Schools, or otherwise wangle their children into them. Religion, or simply knowing the complicated rules of admission, is often the ticket to a good High School. For a detailed case of this, see here

I have in the past commented on Mr Cameron’s references in party political circumstances to the heartbreaking illness and death of his son. I will try not to say any more than this, about the passage on the subject in his Birmingham speech. I really don’t think this has anything to do with policy. I have no doubt that the NHS did all that it could for Mr Cameron’s son, and that the doctors, nurses and others involved exerted themselves greatly in kindness and skill. Likewise I am sure that, had the Camerons hired non-NHS help to aid them in the task of caring for the child, they too would have been models of goodness. Nor do I doubt the great devotion of the Camerons themselves to their child. Heaven knows I would not let political disagreement prevent me from seeing common humanity in an opponent, and sympathizing as far as it is possible to do with his grief and pain.

Most people, confronted with a seriously ill child, will behave in this way, and not expect to be thanked for it. It is what we all know we ought to do. But that was because they were good people in highly moral professions, not because they worked for the NHS, not because the NHS is organised as it is or funded as it is.

These are different arguments. I think they should be kept separate from each other. The NHS is a vast political and economic problem for this country, as well as a vital employer in many parts of Britain where employment is very hard to find. It is a problem which cannot easily be solved, either by simply spending more money, or by reorganisation, or by the market. I don’t think any political party wants to destroy it . I am not by any means sure any of them know how to save it. I would favour a multi-party truce on it, myself , and one in which the mighty weapons of emotion are laid aside.

Not exactly crime-busting

Mrs May, whom Mr Cameron described as ‘crime-busting’, is nothing of the kind. The government, ably assisted by a sedentary, centralized and bureaucratic police force, has dealt with crime by redefining it. Much that normal people have long viewed as crime is no longer classified or recorded as such , let alone deterred or prosecuted.

Mrs May’s supposedly miraculous survival in what is always said to be a risky job, Home Secretary, is largely due to the removal of some of her department’s trickiest responsibilities, now handled by the ‘Justice’ Ministry. Much of the rest is down to her use of first-rate spin-doctors to feed an image of cool competence to willing media sources – and of course to Mr Cameron’s pressing need for a senior female figure in his government, to please the politically correct faction. Who else is there?

Our immigration policy? Posturing, bluster and inaction as usual

The speech contained no explanation of what Mr Cameron actually plans to do about mass immigration (the only thing that would make any difference, immediate departure from the EU, is impossible under our current leadership). I have discussed elsewhere the problems of the Tory position on the EU

So I would only say that it is deeply misleading to describe the next election as a ‘choice’ between the Tories and Labour. Those two parties are so close that most people’s lives will be unaffected by a change from one to the other, or vice versa. The only change available to us is a revolution in our party system in which both Labour and Tory parties are made obsolete, and new parties arise which actually represent the true differences there are among us. Mr Cameron’s main aim is to prevent that revolution from happening. My main aim is to encourage it, for without it there is no hope of the great reforms we so badly need. Please don’t be misled by this stuff.

02 February 2014 12:01 AM

The BBC have refused to accept a complaint about bad language transmitted on national radio – because the complainer’s letter used exactly the same words that they had used on air.

They told Colin Harrow that his letter’s tone and language were ‘unacceptably abusive or offensive’.

In other words, the BBC are ready to transmit words into our homes which their staff are not prepared to read.

The Corporation's complaints staff are supposed to be more sensitive to bad language than (say) elderly ladies or young children.

The programme involved, a Radio 4 play called Paradigm, was broadcast on Tuesday, January 21 at 2.15 pm, long before any sort of watershed.

No warning of bad language was given. An 80-year-old spinster, or a small child, could have been exposed without notice to a dialogue including the words p***, s*** (lavatory expressions), s*** (a sexual expression), b******s, b****r , b*****d, and some other crudities I’ll omit.

It’s striking that the BBC’s relaxation of rules on foul language has reached the point where expletives of this sort can be broadcast without any apparent sense of caution, let alone shame, in the early afternoon, on the country’s main serious speech station, at your expense and mine.

Mr Harrow thought he would treat the Corporation as they had treated him. He opened his letter with the same words and a similar tone (he did not use asterisks, but I have).

‘This afternoon’s play was sh***. It p***ed me off. The b*****d who wrote it needs sh****ing. Perhaps the b****r should be kicked in the testicles while stark b****** naked.’

He added: ‘I hope whoever reads this is not offended by the language used so far, but then if they work for the BBC why should they be?

'After all, every swearword and obscenity was used, some several times over, in this “afternoon” play, so I guess the BBC regards them as perfectly acceptable, including, I’m sure, in letters of complaint.’

Oh no they didn’t.

The metropolitan sophisticates of the Corporation (in my experience well used to every rude word in the language and then some) drew up their skirts like Victorian maiden aunts, and primly rejected the complaint, saying they felt ‘unable to circulate it more widely to our colleagues’.

‘When handling your complaint,’ they continued piously, ‘we will treat you courteously and with respect. We expect you to show equal courtesy and respect towards our staff and reserve the right to discontinue correspondence if you do not.’

They then offered to consider the complaint if Mr Harrow resubmitted it ‘using more acceptable language’.

He has. I contacted the BBC to ask them how they squared their rules on letters of complaint with their willingness to transmit the language of the lavatory wall, without warning, into the nation’s homes.

I was careful to asterisk the offending words in my letter to them, and began it with a warning in bold type that there was offensive language in what followed.

As usual, when caught out in hypocrisy, they couldn’t really understand the question. Totally unable to see themselves as others see them, BBC officials gobbled like affronted turkeys.

First of all, they claimed that listeners are ‘accustomed to the use of realistic, at times challenging language in the context of contemporary dramas’ and uselessly admitted that ‘in hindsight we could have taken further steps to signal the nature of the drama to listeners’.

Then they missed the whole point of the complaint, saying they understood that ‘listeners make their complaints in colourful ways when they are angry’, when in fact this complaint was a thoughtful satire on them, and not angry at all.

It is interesting that when they see such words in cold print, they immediately feel their menacing power – a power they ignore or belittle when they transmit them.

Finally, they said: ‘We think most people would appreciate there is a difference in how language is used in a fictional drama and how it is used in correspondence between real people.’

Real people? Don’t the BBC regard their listeners as real people? I rather suspect they don’t, seeing them merely as faceless serfs who can be relied upon to pay the licence fee and endure whatever liquid manure they choose to pump out through their transmitters.

Complacency of this kind, and on this scale, is usually followed by revolution. Will they listen? No, I swear they won’t.

London's not in England any more

London is said to be drawing talented people away from the rest of the country in a brain drain.

Perhaps so – though in my experience talented, wise people are fleeing the capital due to its ludicrous housing costs, shocking schools, dirt, crime and overcrowding.

In fact, London is now so different from the surrounding country that it has become a separate nation, at least as different from England as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I’m not sure if London still has anything in common with, say, Somerset – which is why Somerset was under water for weeks before anyone in London noticed.

Since the EU plan to break Britain up into small chunks is now almost complete, is there any chance that England could now secede from London?

We could have the new capital in Wells, using as the seat of our small, frugal government the gloriously English Bishop’s palace which the stupid egalitarian Anglican Church no longer wants.

Powerless Britain laid bare

There are moments in our national life that symbolise the plight we are in, and which future historians will seize on to show what things were really like.

One such is the revelation by my colleague Mark Nicol that we had to beg a Turkish scrapyard to search the ravaged corpse of HMS Ark Royal for spare parts for our last remaining carrier, HMS Illustrious.

The real tax scandal

The real tax scandal is not the 50 pence rate, which may well be wrong in principle but actually affects hardly anyone.

It is the 40 pence ‘higher’ rate which, when introduced in 1988, covered 1.6 million people and now grips 4.2 million.

It penalises such plutocrats as head teachers in rural primary schools, police inspectors, long-service train drivers, experienced nurses and IT managers.

Think of it. The harder such people work, the more responsibility they take on, the faster and harder the state confiscates their pay from them.

This is the true attack on enterprise in our society, and we can’t afford to let it go on.

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30 December 2012 3:10 PM

Those of us who know what is going on in this country are often derided by smug, wealthy Londoners. They accuse us of ‘moral panic’ and of exaggerating the breakdown of our society. I ask these complacent people to consider the terrible death of Alan Greaves, attacked on Christmas Eve itself. He was on his way to play the organ at Midnight Mass.

Instead he met evil on a suburban road, as it is now all too easy to do. Our safety on the dark streets does not depend on police patrols, which is a good thing as they have virtually been abolished.

It depends on an invisible web of goodness and restraint, conscience and courage – all things encouraged by the Christian belief that Mr Greaves did so much to support, and which we celebrate and recall at this time of year. Yet these protections could not be relied upon.

A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church. His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs. Yet no general conclusions will be drawn from this by those who take all the decisions in our society.

Those who pontificated grandiosely about a school massacre in America will see no lesson in this, because it does not suit their views. The loss of Mr Greaves, a 68-year-old grandfather, has left a great dark gap in the lives of many people who loved, liked or respected him. But it is the manner of his death that ought to wake a feeling of alarm – and shame – in the minds of those who have subjected this country to a vast, 50-year liberal experiment.

We were going to be so enlightened and progressive that we would no longer have to be good. Authority, punishment, morality, self-discipline, patience, thrift, religion were all deemed to be outdated and unnecessary, not to mention repressive, backward and unfit for this wondrous new century. It was, of course, a terrible mistake, though none of those responsible will admit it, so it goes on and on.

And now we live in a country where an organist can meet a violent end on his way to a Christmas service, and the police can explain such an incident as ‘a robbery gone wrong’. Who thought of this idiotic, insulting phrase? Do our modern non-judgmental police think there is ever a robbery that goes right? The trouble is that they probably do.

***********************

THE horrifying undead figure of Anthony Blair is sniffing around the edge of politics again, hoping to revive his old campaign for the presidency of Europe. Presumably the great apostle of democracy has tired of making £4,500-a-minute speeches at power stations in Azerbaijan, that grubby despotism. Or he has made so much money his bank has asked him to stop.

This reminds me of the many similarities between Princess Tony and his keen imitator, Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister. Both believe in nothing very much. Both loathe their own parties. Both were the future once, but aren’t any more. Old Slippery slipped himself into the papers last week by getting as wet as his policies have become since he failed to get elected on a Thatcherite platform in Stafford back in 1997.

I have seen rare pictures of his face the night he lost, and his surprised disappointment is striking. But I am told there is evidence, mouldering in the archives of an Oxford freesheet, that it took him quite a while to come round to the positions he now so passionately espouses. He is said (does anyone have copies, from May and July 2000?) to have jeered at Mr Blair’s pro-homosexual policies as a ‘fringe agenda’ and condemned Labour for ‘ripping the last recognition of marriage from the tax system by abolishing the married couples’ allowance’.

What we definitely know is that he wrote to a national newspaper in December 2000, sneering at Shaun Woodward, the Tory defector to Labour who then occupied his Witney seat. Amusingly, he attacked Mr Woodward for supporting a hunting ban, and also for backing ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools’. Of course, Mr Woodward was behaving quite logically, hoping for a safe Labour seat, which he got.

But why is MrCameron deliberately riling his own supporters by rushing through same-sex marriage, while forgetting his support for hunting and old-style marriage? My guess is that he knows he cannot possibly win the next Election (he’s right about that). So he is deliberately creating rows with traditional Tories, so that he can blame them for his defeat and general utter failure. You read it here first.

*********

The Liberal Elite normally prefer to ignore me as if I were a bad smell. So I was rather touched by last week’s letter, published in The Mail on Sunday, from Rachel Smith, who is also Mrs Vince Cable – and probably thinks much as he does. She wrote to criticise my article about how cultural revolution and mass migration have destroyed the country we used to know. She accused me of nostalgia for the Fifties, and argued that independent-minded individuals could flourish without the married family.

She claimed that we need mass immigration, and that a property tax would narrow the gap between rich and poor. First, she needs to know that I have no great affection for the Fifties, which I recall as grubby, smoky and chilly, with bad food and a general feeling of skimping and unacknowledged national decline. I don’t want the past back. I just think we chose the wrong future. The best way of bridging the gap between rich and poor would be to rebuild the old middle class, open to all with talent. But it has been squeezed half to death by confiscatory tax, an expanding State and by the destruction of grammar schools – like the one her husband went to.

It is in childhood that the stable married family promotes private life, allowing one generation to pass on its morals, faith, language and traditions to the next. These days most children are swiftly indoctrinated either by the TV or by the State, as their parents scrabble to pay the mortgage. As for her idea that we ‘need’ the skills of migrants, who does she mean by ‘we’? Certainly not the British-born people priced out of work by newcomers.

If Britain does need these skills, then why can’t it impart them to the millions of young people already living here, now idle on benefits? Could it be because of the disastrous failure of comprehensive education, evident to almost every thinking person in the country, except for politicians like her husband?

************

Coming from a Naval family, I’ve grown to mistrust the claim that Mrs Thatcher saved the Falklands. It was the Royal Navy that did it. And I’d rather hoped this year’s Cabinet Papers would remind us that in 1981 the Iron Lady had approved the scrapping of the carrier Hermes, plus the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, and the sale of Invincible. If the Argentinians had waited a few months longer to invade, we would not have had a task force with which to win the islands back. As for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, bitter laughter is the only response to this stupid phrase.

************

Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it? We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power.

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23 June 2012 6:03 PM

What on earth is moral about paying tax? A greedy, slovenly state forces you to hand over roughly half your money every year, by threatening to send you to prison if you don’t.

Then it shovels that money carelessly down a huge hole. The Government is bad at almost everything it does. If you sent it out to buy you a loaf of bread, it would come back a week later with stale cake, and pretend it had lost the change.

People who can afford to do so avoid the wretched ‘services’ the state arranges in return for this legalised theft. What are these? Schools that teach sexual licence but not times tables or proper reading; police who are never there when you want them; hospitals plagued with inexcusable dirt and neglect; a welfare system that punishes thrift and encourages sloth.

Meanwhile, the real essentials – the absolute vital duties of any government – are neglected or destroyed. Our borders are abandoned, our roads potholed, our Navy sunk, our Army soon to be small enough to fit into Wembley Stadium. As for criminal justice, where do I begin?

As it happens, I think I pay my taxes as fully as possible. Unlike several Left-wing commentators and broadcasters of my acquaintance, I don’t qualify for, and so don’t use, the obvious get-outs. But am I guilty if I take out an ISA (a form of tax avoidance) or set a charitable donation against tax? Certainly not. And if I were offered the chance to pay much less tax, simply and legally, I would take it.

The point was beautifully stated long ago by an American judge with the wonderful name of Learned Hand, who ruled: ‘Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the Treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes . . . nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.’

But it is not the same for the alleged comedian Jimmy Carr, a man whose jokes have been described by his own father as ‘cruel’, ‘dirty’ and ‘unkind’.

Mr Carr has become famous and rich because of his modish Leftism. He’s for the things I’m against. He used to be noisily against tax-avoidance, and I suspect he still would be if he hadn’t been found out doing it. For him, and people like him, there is an obligation to pay lots of tax, because they worship the modern liberal welfare state.

I recommend a minimum tax rate of 80 per cent for Leftist comedians, getting higher as they get more Left-wing.

Squalid fashion for a bankrupt nation

I’ve always thought ‘You’ll look funny when you’re 50’ was the best advice you could offer to would-be tattoo fashion victims, though, of course, many of them can’t believe they ever will be 50.

What will Joanna Southgate feel about her tattoos when she reaches that milestone? And why is it that so many young Britons are eagerly adopting styles – shaved heads for men, tattoos for men and women – once mainly associated with prison, squalor, depravity or even slavery?

There’s something slightly frightening about it, as if in some instinctive way they are preparing themselves for the future that lies just around the next corner for our bankrupt country.

Ed is only sorry immigrants lost him votes

I don’t need Edward Miliband to tell me that I’m not a bigot. I knew already.

But for daring – over many years – to oppose mass immigration into this country, I and many others were smeared in this way by Labour sympathisers.

If Mr Miliband now admits that was wrong, what is he going to do about it? Will he and his comrades, deep down, now recognise that we were right? If there are now too many foreign migrants in this country, which is the clear implication of his speech, there isn’t actually anything he can do about it.

The transformation of this country was deliberately sought by New Labour, as we know from the blurted revelations of former party speechwriter Andrew Neather. It’s happened. But Mr Miliband’s private polls tell him the policy is unpopular.

So he makes a speech claiming to have changed his mind.Has he really? I don’t think so. New Labour’s upper crust is made up of rich, snobbish London bohemians, who love the way that mass immigration has provided them with cheap servants and cheap restaurants.

They also despise the older Britain that the rest of us rather liked living in, and want to erase all trace of it.

Now they want to have it both ways – to keep the votes of the maltreated masses, while secretly despising their opinions. The Useless Tories, I might add, are exactly the same. Expect no good news from them.

A test that's sure to fail

Sorry about this, but the return of O-levels is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger. And Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, must know that.

The old GCEs were designed for a selective system, where the academically bright went to grammar schools. The equality fanatics who control the Tory Party (and the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats, and the civil servants in the Education Ministry, and the teachers’ unions) will not allow that.

Mr Gove is taking part in a hilarious new national game called ‘distancing ourselves from the Coalition’. As the next Election gets closer, Tories and Lib Dems will both be sucking up to their core votes, trying to get them to forget that the closeness and love of 2010 ever happened. This will mean a lot of posturing, but not much real action.

And Mr Gove and Vince Cable will both be working hard to become the leaders of their parties. They all fooled you in 2010. Do please try not to be fooled again in 2015.

Proof of the Good Friday surrender

Sinn FEIN’S Martin McGuinness is to meet Her Majesty the Queen. Well, who’s doing who a favour, exactly?

I know the Queen has to meet all sorts in her job, but this dead-eyed fanatic must be among the least agreeable companions you could find in a long day’s journey.

If anyone doubted that the Good Friday Agreement was a humiliating surrender by a once-great country to a criminal gang, they can’t doubt it now. ................................................................................................................................................

All the cheerleaders of the Arab Spring need to be asked how they feel about it now, and if by any chance they wish they had been less keen to endorse it. But, even as it falls to bits, they still support it.

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06 June 2012 2:18 PM

Again and again, in articles and discussion programmes, I hear the phrase ‘democratically-elected’ used as if it is a synonym for ‘automatically good’. Thus, whatever one might say about the Queen, a President would be ‘democratically-elected’. And so he would in some way be more legitimate than any other head of state.

Why do people believe this? What reason do they have to believe it? Has it proved to be reliable in human history?

Contrary to the beliefs of most, neither of the two great free civilisations in the world have any principled attachment to being mass (let alone universal) suffrage democracies. The original U.S. Constitution says very little indeed about voting, which was left to the individual states. The founding fathers of the USA would have been appalled by the idea of it. That is one reason why they built their capital (whose long prospects and wide avenues were I think designed to make it easy to put down revolution with grapeshot) in the remote swamps on the Potomac to avoid the dangers (which they much feared ) of mob rule.

In many parts of the early USA, the principle of ‘no representation without taxation” which is after all the corollary of “no taxation without representation”) meant only 70% of adult males qualified for the vote. This proportion grew during the mid-19th century , largely because political parties wanted to expand the market for their lies and promises. Secret ballots did not come to the USA till the late 19th century. As for the USA’s slave and freed slave population, largely black-skinned, we all know how recently they were allowed the vote in reality.

The US Senate was specifically designed to be protected from ‘the fury of democracy’, hence the fact that Senators have much longer terms in office than members of the House of Representatives. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which faced strong and honourable opposition from several leading figures, U.S. Senators were not in any case elected by popular vote, but chosen by their state’s legislatures.

The USA of course has a third (wholly unelected) chamber of government, the Supreme Court, which is in many ways more powerful than either the House, the Senate or the Presidency. Many of the most radical changes in American life, notably the legalising of abortion, have been brought about by this body. I suspect that left-wingers would be alarmed at any suggestion that it should be democratically elected.

Britain’s reformers, likewise, were far from keen on the rule of the masses. Cromwell loathed (and executed ) the Levellers. The great factions of the 18th and early 19th centuries were not remotely democratic. The freedom and order of this country were largely the result of an adversarial parliament (in both Houses), Jury trial, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act (see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’ for details of this, unless you feel unable to ready my books, in which case, take my word for it).

Mass suffrage democracy, when it actually came about, was, to begin with anyway, an advantage for the Tory Party which – in the days before the dismantling of marriage – could rely on the women’s vote as being solidly socially conservative. This paradox has now come to an end, but it has always made me laugh.

Have we benefited from mass suffrage? In one very important way, we have suffered terribly from it. In what must be one of his most prophetic statements, Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons on 13th May 1901 that ‘the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings’ .

His prediction was borne out with great speed. Surely any thoughtful person must be struck with a cold feeling round the heart when he reads Aldous Huxley’s 1947 preface to ‘Brave New World’ and comes across this passage: ‘But meanwhile we are in the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate revolution. Its next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to bother with prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that we may have enough sense, if not to stop fighting altogether, at least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century ancestors. The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern. For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to the Times, suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know --Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all but universal famine.’

The ‘nationalistic radicals’ were of course democrats, including Churchill himself. They had made a popular, democratic case for war to stimulate recruitment and to permit the high taxation and general ruin and regimentation which the war involved. But they could not in the end control the 'democratic' patriotic monster they had created, and dared not end the war, even once it was clear that it would be a disaster to continue it.

Nuclear weapons, by promising a repeat of the 30 Years War with knobs on, restrained the warmongering populist tendency for a while. But when the Cold war ended they were quick to find new battlefields, as they strove to impose ‘democracy’ on the planet with fire and the sword. It is public opinion and 'democracy' which are being swayed, by 'democratic' TV reports into supporting the next war, an intervention in Syria.

Huxley’s statement (in 1947) that ‘for the last 30 years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left’ is even more prophetic than Churchill’s. How else could Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan be regarded as conservatives? Theyb got away with it only because real conservatives had died out.

Personally, as I examine the record of ‘democratically-elected’ rulers across the world, my Cromwellian head begins to be ruled by my Royalist heart, and I start to see the point of giving the headship of the state to the Lord’s Anointed, provided it can be combined with the rule of law, an adversarial parliament, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Jury Trial and Habeas Corpus (in short, the 1689 settlement rightly known as the Glorious Revolution).

As for ‘democracy’, how is it morally reliable or creditable to grant the ultimate power to political parties? It is these that, in any democracy, actually control access to the legislature. They are controlled by the executive, bought by rich interests, impermeable to the public will. Don’t believe me? Try to become an MP and see what happens. Even primary elections, on the face of it a good idea, can now easily be purchased by millions (see the recent triumph of Mitt Romney, beloved by no-one but also outspent by nobody).

The trite conclusion, now a cliche, is that democracy is the worst of all systems, except for the others. The implied suggestion is that we must have this disreputable fraud, or subject ourselves to Hitler, Mussolini, the Chinese Communist Party , Stalin or Ceausescu. But I don’t think that is really the choice at all.

I tend to think that the systems of government of Britain and the USA, before universal suffrage, were far better at delivering ordered liberty , peace and prosperity (the ultimate aims of any government) than their modern successors.

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Next, a word on why I always put ‘libertarian’ in inverted commas. Most thinking humans, in our post-Christian world , yearn for a universal touchstone of goodness which will somehow substitute for the Christian faith. For some it is the market, for some it is ‘liberty’, for others it is equality. It is easily demonstrable that the market sometimes, even often, lays waste valuable things, destroys customs and taboos, tosses aside human feelings. It is obvious to the slowest thinker that ( as Karl Marx pointed out) the freedom of all is impossible, as it will lead to conflicts between groups who wish to be free to do something which tramples on the freedom of another. ‘No man fights freedom’, wrote the sage of Trier, ’He fights at most the freedom of others’. Well, exactly. The trouble with these ideas is that they simply lack the universal power over all humanity of the Sermon on the Mount and the Commandments, and that they are based on a desire for power, rather than on Christianity’s preference for love, and its central suspicion of power and the mob, as so graphically set out in the story of the Passion. And sometimes I think a little light mockery is the best way to make people think. After all, one day they may realise that it is possible they are mistaken.

****

And finally a few thoughts on why someone who chooses to call my books ‘drivel’ (yet now admits he hasn’t even read one of them, because he found it too hard) can reasonably be asked if he has any work of his own which we can see, to see if he is qualified to say so. I didn’t stop him saying so, or censor or disallow his post. I allow all kinds of people to post the most astonishing rubbish about me here. I just questioned his qualification.

Actually, had he made a TV programme, exhibited a painting or produced a play, or done any creative thing involving the public giving of himself, he would be qualified to have a view. I tend to think, having written and presented four TV programmes and written five books (four published, one to come out in the autumn) that I have risked myself in the public square and can therefore pronounce on other people’s works. As it happens, I seldom write bad reviews of books (I make exceptions where their authors are self-serving political figures, who are not primarily authors). If I am sent a book which I think is really bad, I generally decline to write a review at all. My criticisms of films are essentially dissents from universal praise, and I believe that they are informed and thoughtful and that some readers have found them helpful.

What is the purpose of criticisms of such things, by the way? It varies. In the case of Philip Pullman’s children’s books, I wished to warn parents that the stories are propaganda. In the case of the recent film ‘The King’s Speech’, I wished to ensure that the film’s severe deviation from historical truth was placed on record, because of a fear that it would (as historical fiction on film often does) become the accepted version of a historical incident. I thought the mangling of ‘Tinker Tailor’ in the Gary Oldman film (and the comparable mangling of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ in a recent TV version) illuminated our cultural decline and the working methods of the cultural revolution.

I like to think that I can tell the truth in plain English, even where it will get me disliked. But I think I would hesitate to come to a writer’s weblog, cloddishly and blatantly misrepresent his views, and - when patiently invited to discover what those views actually are - to dismiss his books as ‘drivel’ to his face, not having made any serious effort to read or understand those books. If I have done anything comparable here, I regret it. But I don’t think I have.

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13 May 2012 12:39 AM

The British State treats us, the good, kind and law-abiding, with officious scorn. We have learned, when we are the victims of crime or disorder, that the police don’t need us, and they expect the same in return.

If we dare to travel abroad, we are terrorist suspects on the way out, to be poked and humiliated, and serfs on the way back in, herded, hectored and corralled.

If we try to pay our taxes honestly and on time, we are held on the phone for half an hour. Happy families are torn apart in secret courts, where guilt is presumed and a fair hearing impossible.

The state school system pretends to offer us ‘choice’ while imposing a wretched low standard on all, from which only the wealthy can escape. If we dare to grow old and ill, our savings are plundered and stripped, or we die in our own filth in callous hospital wards.

But fight and rob your way into one of our prisons, which generally involves at least a dozen quite serious criminal convictions, and the attitude is entirely different. Suddenly they want to be nice to you.

Pasted up in an Oxfordshire byway, I found extraordinary proof of what most of us have long suspected and what politicians always try to deny (above). We are now so soft on wrong-doing that the wicked must be laughing at us.

It is a recruiting poster for prison officers. Beneath a picture of two smiling, kindly types in uniform sharing a jolly moment are the words: ‘Father figures. Agony Aunts. When you’re the closest to family anyone’s experienced in a long while, it becomes less of a job and more of a calling. Prison officers. People officers by nature.’

It continues: ‘Gaining the respect of offenders isn’t a skill you can learn. It’s something you need to have in you already: that ability to build rapport with a broad range of characters and ultimately make a breakthrough.’

The Ministry of Injustice, whose name and superscription are on the poster, have confirmed to me that it is really theirs. There you have it. For the worst people in the country, we hire ‘agony aunts’ and ‘father figures’ whose job is to ‘gain the respect’ of people who have repeatedly trampled on the rights and freedoms of their neighbours.

For the rest of us, death and taxes, indifference, inefficiency, scorn and an array of decrepit, slovenly ‘services’, which grow worse the more we pay for them.

Why, exactly, do you vote for the people who are responsible for this? I’d love to know.

It's pompous pagan piffle

Is it compulsory to be enthusiastic about the Olympics? Too bad, if so. I laughed and laughed when the Olympic flame, an ‘ancient tradition’ in fact invented by the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, was blown out by the wind.

I see no reason to look forward to this flatulent festival of cheating, whose authenticity was long ago destroyed by drugs. I certainly don’t look forward to paying for it.

Surely only a totalitarian maniac could want it in his capital? What free country desires or needs the silly pagan panoply, the absurd, grandiose buildings, and the pompous self-importance of the IOC who want special lanes for their cars, like the old Soviet Politburo?

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War on Drugs latest. The fiction that we have stern prohibition of drugs in this country is still seriously believed by some people. How do they keep it up?

As Paragraph 6.65 of the Independent Chief Inspector’s report on Border Control at Gatwick records, passengers arriving with cannabis ‘for personal use’ who should have been arrested were let off with a warning.

The only mystery is why they bothered to import it, when cannabis farms are Britain’s only boom industry.

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Why 650,000 children are using mind-altering drugs

A powerful stimulant drug, methylphenidate hydrochloride, is being widely taken by British schoolchildren. At the last count, more than 650,000 young people, some very young indeed, were believed to be regular users.

This emerged last week from a Parliamentary question. The use of this potent pill has increased fourfold since it first became common in 1999. And its users are taking stronger and stronger doses, as they grow tolerant.

The drug has a long list of adverse effects including chest pain, hair loss, palpitations, stunted growth, insomnia, rapid heart rate, skin rashes, dizziness and anxiety. It has been linked to suicide. If those involved were teenagers in nightclubs, and they were buying it from the usual evil dealers, I expect there would be a big media fuss, and rightly so, especially about the three-year-old users.

But there isn’t, because the other name for methylphenidate hydro-chloride is Ritalin, and legions of parents, teachers, doctors and social workers have somehow been persuaded that this powerful mind- altering substance is actually good for children. You and I, meanwhile, are paying for it on the NHS.

By the time our sluggish nation realises that this is a horrifying national scandal, the damage will have been done.

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On a rare visit to W H Smith, the shop where good books go to die, I find that this once-staid chain has a huge stack of what I believe is known as Mommy Porn right by the checkout.

And once I have swerved round the bondage and whipping department, the next thing I see is a special communications booth, by which I can get into instant touch with a law firm. And people tell me I should be optimistic.

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Mr Slippery proclaims that there are lots of proper conservative things he longs to do, if only it wasn’t for those horrid Liberal Democrats.

Not only does Old Slippery do this in the same week that he appears with Nick Clegg in a comical Renewal of Coalition Vows in a tractor factory. He also doesn’t seem to realise that it is completely incredible.

The Liberal Democrats have been rubbing their eyes in wonder since 2010 because of the happy willingness of the Tories to give in to all their demands. And the Prime Minister has strong conservative instincts in the same way that hamsters are famed for their feral aggression.

It’s the political equivalent of ‘the cheque is in the post’ or ‘the van broke down’ or ‘the dog ate my homework’.

The fact that he doesn’t seem remotely ashamed of it suggests that he is actually beginning to turn into the true Heir to Blair, a man who has so successfully faked sincerity that he no longer knows or cares when he is lying.

11 September 2010 10:38 PM

Here comes the Pope, though he would have much more fun if he stayed in Rome for root canal dentistry.

His mysterious visit, to the country in Europe where he is most likely to be insulted, is the target of every liberal elitist in Britain.

A whole assembly of crackpot sexual revolutionaries and wild ultra-Leftists will be ranged against him.

Such people normally do not have much popular support.

Against the previous Pope, their campaign would have been insignificant squeaking, barely heard above the applause.

But thanks to the abuse of children by some priests, and the Roman Church’s feeble efforts to punish them, all that has changed. It is now respectable again to be anti-Catholic.

Well, that’s reasonable. Paedophilia is disgusting, and particularly so among men supposedly dedicated to goodness.

But the Vatican doesn’t actually tell its priests to abuse children. The vast majority of them do not so do. And it has tried to stamp out the problem and to offer genuine apologies to the victims.

I (as a non-Roman Catholic) have examined some of the main charges levelled against Benedict XVI by his attackers, and found that several of them are simply untrue, whereas others have been crudely distorted.

I have also examined the record of one of the main critics of the Papal visit.

This is Peter Tatchell, prominent in the ‘Protest the Pope’ campaign.

I admire Mr Tatchell’s physical and moral courage, notably when he was badly beaten by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards for attempting a citizen’s arrest of that monster. The effects of that beating still trouble him.

But this does not cancel out what I believe is the hypocrisy of his attempt - and that of the Left in general - to wage war on the Pope by employing the charge of condoning or failing to act against paedophilia (it is No 5 in the charge-sheet set out by ‘Protest the Pope’).

For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start­ling letter to the Guardian newspaper.

In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored.

When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech.

He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’

Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.

He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.

He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.

And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures.

'Several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13.

'None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed.

What he said in 1997 remains deeply shocking to almost all of us. But shock fades into numb acceptance, as it has over and over again.

Much of what is normal now would have been deeply shocking to British people 50 years ago. We got used to it.

How will we know where to stop? Or will we just carry on for ever?

As the condom-wavers and value-free sex-educators advance into our primary schools, and the pornography seeps like slurry from millions of teenage bedroom computers, it seems clear to me that shock, by itself, is no defence against this endless, sordid dismantling of moral barriers till there is nothing left at all.

Yet when one of the few men on the planet who argues, with force, consistency and reason, for an absolute standard of goodness comes to this country, he is reviled by fashionable opinion.

Bombing cities is just wrong – even when the planes are ours

Can we be straight about the Blitz, now that it is 70 years since it began?

Most of us have two absolutely clear reactions to it. The first is that dropping bombs on women and children in their homes is a wicked form of warfare.

The second is that - despite all the horrors of being bombed - the British people were not demoralised or blasted into defeatism, but worked all the harder for victory because it was the only way to get back at the enemy who dropped death on them from the sky.

Yet as soon as anyone suggests that we were wrong to bomb German women and children in their homes - as I firmly believe we were - they are shouted down by cries of ‘They asked for it!’.

Actually, they didn’t ask for it at all. The children, as always, had no say in the matter.

And the people who bravely voted against Hitler to the last lived in the poor urban areas which we deliberately bombed.

And when anyone argues - as I do - that the bombing of German civilians was also an ineffective way of fighting the war, doing surprisingly little damage to the Nazi war effort, they are shouted down by apologists who seem to think that Germans responded to bombing differently from British people.

It’s not true, and those who have studied the facts agree.

Yet I am absolutely in favour of a memorial, large and majestic, in a place where as many people as possible will see it, to the young men who nightly climbed into their bombers and flew over Germany.

They believed they were helping to destroy a great tyranny. They trusted their leaders.

That is why they set off, hearts in mouths, in the full knowledge that they probably wouldn’t come back, and that they were likely to die in a specially horrible fashion.

Not since the Somme in 1916 had so much steadfast valour and youth been squandered by old men who ought to have known better.

On the Bomber Command war memorial, alongside the shattering number of names and the chokingly sad ages at which they died, should be the words ‘Lions, led by Donkeys’.

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I have paid thousands of pounds and dollars in tax to British and American taxmen - both in supposedly free countries - over the past 30-odd years.

And they have never once said ‘Thank You’.

This is because they think, deep down, that they have an absolute right to all our money, and we should be grateful that they let us keep any of it.

If this isn’t true, then why are they so rude to us when we give them so much money? Can you think of anyone else who does this?

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